Ethiopian Highlands Annual Review and Planning meeting

17-18 September 2012
Info centre break out room, ILRI Ethiopia, Addis Ababa
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Cooperating and collaborating around the programme

Participants were invited to attend to three stands in a marketplace, all related to cooperation and collaboration: Aligning with partners, monitoring and evaluation, managing the CG partnership (including communication).

Summary:

• Good contact with various partners that could work on complementary tracks with Africa RISING e.g. DfID. Need to build rapport with national partners, EU, World Bank.
• M&E: Different indicators developed around crop, nutrition, livestock, water, agroforestry, gender, institutions, household income etc. Once we have more clarity on exact (location-specific) activities these indicators can be looked into from a systemic perspective (how do all these indicators add up to something greater than their sum). These indicators should also consider capacity building and ecosystem services. IFPRI will be hiring an M&E officer for each mega site including the Ethiopian Highlands.
• Good plan for regular coordination meetings to manage CG partnerships and Africa RISING science with research component leaders.

(Elements from the presentation by Peter Thorne)
Gaps:

• CGIAR - CIAT?
• NARS?
• Academia?
• NGOs?
• Other development initiatives - AGP?
• ATA etc.?

Why partnerships?

• Strengthen research capacity / synergies?
• Not re-inventing wheels or inventing new wheels with flat tires
• Grounding the research in development problems
• Opportunities for scaling

Discussion:

Alignment with partners

• Good contact with DfID (Maggie Gill / Peter Thorne) who are interested in supporting e.g. innovation and development-focused work in correlation with us.
• Australian Council for food security interested and Melissa, Iain, Shirley in touch about this.
• In earlier rounds, interest from the EU, World Bank etc. but not much traction right now.
• IFPRI is conducting a project mapping tool which could very nicely link up with Africa RISING.
• National partners? Crucial to align with national government priorities. Pathway there would be to work with USAid colleagues and with EIAR (Geletu to help there).
  • Regional research center
  • National research

Comment: There is a Feed the Future bureau that connects all the FtF activities to bring together all the related activities.

Monitoring and evaluation

Different indicators identified for crops, livestock, agroforestry, water use, gender, institutions etc.
We generated some draft / general indicators:

• Crop: increase in productivity (soil fertility management, biomass, diversification)
• Nutrition: Calories, protein, vitamin diet
• Livestock: Biomass and forage increase, increase in milk and meat production + household income
• Water: WUE
• Agroforestry: Increase in tree cover. Wood and non wood products, increase in multi-purpose trees (orate, nutrition, income)
• Gender: Increase in equity, particiaption in decision making
• Institutions: Increase in engagement in local institutions, increase in strength and linkages between local / regional / national institutions
• Household income: On-farm income (trees and tree produce), bee keeping, reduction in reliance on food aid.

Q: How different are these indicators from the Mission ones?
A: They are from the same basin of indicators but not exactly the same.

Q: How could we measure the indicators as a whole system? Do we have anything that tells us more about how the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts?
A: Knowing the project and activities we can develop better indicators but since we don't know what specific activities will be, here are some general themes that we could derive specific indicators from. --> We came up with system-level productivity indicators etc.

Q: Are we developing our own indicators now? How do they relate to the M&E workshop?
A: We have custom indicators. What has been mentioned here is partly feeding into the FtF indicators but we can also have some custom indicators.

Q: What about environmental indicators?
A: We can't pin this down until we have research activities clearly defined.

Q: Who is the M&E lead?
A: IFPRI will be hiring an M&E officer that will be assigned to overseeing M&E activities in each mega-site etc.

Comments:

• Capacity building is missing there.
• It might be interesting to look at ecosystem services for system-wide.

Managing the CG partnership

• At program level there is a program consortium team - at each mega site project level there is a project coordination committee - e.g. one for Ethiopian Highlands too.
• There is a project coordinator (Peter Thorne)
• We want to have one project, including various components (e.g. M&E, research characterization and stratification [which might involve 3-4 centres], comms), some activities integrated (i.e. not by individual CG centers)
• We suggest having 2 CG research planning forums every year, one annual review and planning meetings and some occasional PCC meetings.
• Each financial year to start on 1 October until 30 September and we could organize the rotation around those dates.
• The 'component' leaders will report to / discuss with Peter (the leader).
• CIAT and other centres that are not physically present will be invited to chip in too.

Comments:

• EIAR should also be part of the research planning forums, as well as regional research centers.
• The research planning forums should be thought through in their relation with e.g. the NBDC-instigated land and water management platform.